


Valyrian Love Poetry: Or, How to Avoid Comparing Your Crush's Ears to a Helmet

by azurish



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Bad Poetry, Brother-Sister Relationships, F/F, Fluff, Humor, Love Poems, Modern Westeros
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-11
Updated: 2017-09-11
Packaged: 2018-12-26 11:34:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12058149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/azurish/pseuds/azurish
Summary: Rhaegar sank down into an armchair in his living room and closed his eyes.  He wasn’t sure whether he was too tired to understand what his sister wanted or whether she really had just woken him at four am to ask him to proofreadpoetry.  “Is this for a class?” he asked.“Oh, no, it’s for a girl,” Daenerys said.Daenerys has fallen head-over-heels for a cute linguistics major.  After learning that Missandei thinks Valyrian "is the only proper language for poetry," she's not going to let anything - from her own inability to rhyme to inconvenient time zones - get in the way of wooing her girl.  Rhaegar just wishes that having written folk rock harp ballads in his embarrassing high school band phase didn't make him the closest thing his little sister has to an editor.





	Valyrian Love Poetry: Or, How to Avoid Comparing Your Crush's Ears to a Helmet

**Author's Note:**

> Content warning for a brief discussion of underage drinking (well, by US law, anyways - I have no idea what the drinking age in Astapor is). This is based on the show 'verse, because 1) show!Daenerys and Missandei are actually about the right ages to date each other, but also 2) the show scene where Missandei corrects Daenerys's Dothraki pronunciation and tells her that she _loves_ Valyrian poetry is _blatantly_ flirtatious, I'm just saying.

            It was just past four in the morning when Rhaegar’s cellphone began ringing.  Or, more accurately, his cellphone began serenading him and his sleeping wife with the cheerful strains of an electronica remix of “The Bear and the Maiden Fair,” a ringtone Elia had selected because it offended his delicate musical sensibilities.  At four in the morning, it offended both their sensibilities.  Elia groaned and flapped a hand against his shoulder in a sleepy effort to encourage him to act as he fumbled for the phone on his bedside table.

            Squinting at his phone, he saw Daenerys’s caller ID displayed on the screen.  “Ur Favorite Sister (Dany)” was written across an old image of her running barefoot across a sandy beach.  Her silvery curls were dripping wet and she was smiling.  He had snapped the photo years before, on the last day of a family vacation to the beaches of Massey’s Hook.  Rhaenys had just pushed her young aunt into the cold salt water.  Daenerys had shrieked with outrage before bursting into laughter and running after her niece to catch her in a dripping wet hug of revenge.  The image of a laughing, thirteen year-old Dany chasing after his daughter always reminded him of the ways he really did love his family, even when Viserys was posting obnoxious MRA screeds on Facebook or his father was calling to rant.

            But the usual warm glow the image brought to his heart had to contend with the fact that it was four am and he had work in a few hours.  He swiped brusquely across the screen to answer the call.  “Hello?  Are you all right?”

            “Yes, I’m fine,” replied Daenerys.  The weak connection made her voice sound tinny.  “I was just calling because I need some help.”

            “Is everything OK?” Rhaegar asked.  She had left for college barely two weeks prior, and a phone call in the middle of the night rarely boded well.

            “Of course, don’t worry about me,” Daenerys said.

            “What makes you call, then?” Rhaegar said.  Still lying with her eyes closed next to him, Elia poked his hip and pointed at the door.  He muffled the phone with his shoulder and whispered, “Yes, sorry, love you, be right back.”  Then he slipped out of bed and padded across the chilly floor of their bedroom to the hallway beyond.

            “I need you to proofread a poem in High Valyrian for me,” Daenerys said.  “Well, edit it and give me some suggestions for making it better.  Also help with the rhymes, because I can’t figure out what in the seven hells rhymes with ‘laehurlion,’ for starters, and some of the other ones are also giving me trouble.”

            Rhaegar sank down into an armchair in his living room and closed his eyes.  He wasn’t sure whether he was too tired to understand what his sister wanted or whether she really had just woken him at four am to ask him to proofread _poetry_.  “Is this for a class?” he asked.

            “Oh, no, it’s for a girl,” Daenerys said.

            “It’s for a girl,” Rhaegar said flatly.

            “Yes!” Daenerys replied.  “She lives on the floor below me and gods, Rhaegar, I have _never_ crushed harder on anyone in my life.  She’s really cute, and she has a ridiculously charming smile.  Also, she has the best eyebrows I have ever seen – I swear, if we date, I am definitely getting her to teach me her ways.  She’s hilariously bad at telling jokes, it’s adorable –”

            “Dany, do you know what time it is on Dragonstone?” Rhaegar interrupted.

            There was a short silence, and then Daenerys said, “ _Damn_.  Sorry, I completely forgot.  It’s nearly noon here, and I just didn’t even think about it!”

            Rhaegar sighed.  His little sister had always been impulsive.  She had only arrived in Astapor to study at its renowned university half a month ago, and even he was still adjusting to the time difference.  It was an easy mistake to make.  He just wished it hadn’t been the sort of mistake that had woken him up in the middle of the night.

            “Gods, I hope I didn’t wake you up,” Daenerys said.  “Wait, of course I woke you up, it’s – what – just past four there?  Ugh.  I am so sorry.  I can just call back later.”

            Rhaegar contemplated the carpet before him as he considered his options.  Realistically, he wasn’t going to get back to sleep for a while yet; his nights were always plagued by insomnia and strange, disjointed nightmares.  Holding Elia close seemed to help, but she was likely already asleep again by now, and he didn’t want to wake her.  “I suppose if I’m awake, I might as well make the best of it,” he said at last.

            “No, you don’t have to –”

            “It’s all right,” Rhaegar said firmly.  “So.  What’s this mystery girl called?  And why are you writing her poetry in Valyrian?”

            “Her name’s Missandei,” Daenerys said.  “Which is a beautiful name for a beautiful girl, but it doesn’t rhyme with many Valyrian words.  She’s a linguistics major, and she’s told me she speaks nineteen languages already.”

            Rhaegar frowned.  “Nineteen languages?  Are you sure she wasn’t just teasing you?”

            “Missandei is _very_ intelligent,” Daenerys said sharply, and Rhaegar could swear he could hear his sister’s stubborn scowl through the phone.  “She loves learning new languages.”

            “All right, no offense meant,” Rhaegar said.  “So – the poetry?”

            “There was a party the other weekend at a sorority that my roommate knew about, and I brought Missandei along with me,” Daenerys said.  “We maybe got pretty drunk –”

            “Dany!”

            “It’s OK, I was drinking responsibly,” Daenerys protested.

            “Just be careful,” Rhaegar said, and then added grudgingly, “although I’m glad you told me.”  Even to his own ears, he didn’t sound entirely convincing.  He and Elia had spent a good deal of time developing a parental policy towards drinking at college, but even if it was important to establish trust and reasonable rules, Rhaegar still didn’t like the idea of his _baby sister_ touching alcohol.

            “I was!” Daenerys said.  “Anyway.  I was drunk and trying to impress her, so I told her I could speak Dothraki.”

            “I thought you only learned that to catch the attention of what-was-his-name, that boy back in high school,” Rhaegar said.

            “Yes, but I spent a year studying it!  And Khal Drogo always told me I sounded like a native speaker.  But Missandei said my pronunciation’s a little off.  That was embarrassing, so I told her that even if my Dothraki wasn’t quite perfect, I could speak flawless High Valyrian, thanks to all those Valyrian heritage lessons Dad made us take as kids,” Daenerys said.  “She giggled, and then she told me that she _loved_ High Valyrian, that it was her _favorite_ language of all the languages she speaks.  When she gets drunk, she gets nerdy about languages, which is pretty cute.  She called it the ‘perfect tongue’ and said it was the most beautiful language for poetry.”

            Although Daenerys had apparently considered it necessary to wax rhapsodic about this Missandei and share information about her drinking habits first, Rhaegar finally felt like the conversation was drifting back into recognizable territory.  “And that’s why you’re trying to write a poem in High Valyrian?” he asked.

            “Exactly,” Daenerys said.  “I’m writing a poem to ask her out.  Only it turns out that poetry is harder than I thought it would be.”

            “What do you mean?”

            “I didn’t think rhyming words could be _that_ difficult,” Daenerys said, with the breezy confidence that Rhaegar’s little sister seemed to display towards everything in life.  “Like – rose, knows, suppose, meadows.”  Rhaegar resisted the urge to point out that, in fact, the stresses on the syllables of “meadows” were wrong for rhyming with the other words.  “But High Valyrian is so much harder to write poetry in than the Common Tongue, and I was hoping you could help me out.  You’re sort of the family expert, after all; none of the rest of us has ever written a real song.”

            Rhaegar forced back the rush of embarrassment his little sister’s words provoked.  Every teenage boy who knew how to play an instrument went through an embarrassing phase where he ran around calling himself a rock star.  It was just Rhaegar’s bad luck that he had been enterprising enough to start a revival folk rock group with his friends.  And it was his worse luck that they had recorded an entire album of themselves crooning angsty songs he had composed while Rhaegar himself strummed along on the harp.  _Elia thought it was sweet_ , he reminded himself.  Even if she had laughed so hard she had cried when two of his groomsmen dug up the CD and played it at their rehearsal dinner.

            “I assume you absolutely didn’t want to ask Viserys,” Rhaegar said.

            Although he couldn’t see his sister, he could easily imagine her eye roll.  “Viserys thinks that telling people about our _noble_ and _ancient_ family history is a good way to flirt,” Daenerys said.  “I can’t even imagine what he thinks good love poetry is.”

            Rhaegar laughed.  “All right.  Email it to me and I’ll look it over.”

            “Email?  You’re such an old man,” Daenerys said.

            “Not all of us communicate entirely over Facebook or Snapchat or whatever it is you kids are using these days,” Rhaegar replied.

            “Don’t pretend to be a curmudgeon, you do have a Snapchat,” Daenerys said.

            “Only because Rhaenys set it up,” he retorted.  A moment later, a notification from his inbox popped up on his phone.  “OK.  I’ll send it back to you when I’m done.”

            “Thanks, Rhaegar,” Daenerys said.  “You’re the best ancient oldest brother ever.”

            “And I suppose you’re all right, for a tiny baby sister,” Rhaegar said.   “Now let me edit this and go to sleep!”

            After she hung up, he downloaded and opened the promisingly named “DraftofMissandeiPoetryThing.doc.”  The poem was two pages long and written in one of the special curly fonts that came prepackaged with the editing software.  Perhaps Daenerys considered the aesthetic effect romantic?  It had far too many curlicues for Rhaegar’s taste, so for ease of reading, he changed the font to a standard setting.

            Although he and Daenerys seemed to share whatever genes had given them their distinctive Targaryen appearance, it was immediately evident that she had not inherited the same talent he had for composition.  Daenerys seemed to have approached writing poetry in a foreign language with the same bull-headed determination she used to conquer all other obstacles.  While Rhaegar was far from a professional poet, even he knew that meter and a consistent rhyme scheme mattered.  He also felt sure that rhyming your crush’s name with the word for “aquatic” was insufficiently romantic.  As was describing her ears as “gelte,” or helmet-like – or had she confused “gelte” for “gevie,” the word for beautiful?  Either way, ears were not a good subject for love poetry.

            Turning on TrackChanges felt like girding himself for battle.  With the sinking apprehension that he wasn’t going to get back to sleep at all, Rhaegar settled down to work.

*

            When he woke up two mornings later, a notification from his rarely used Snapchat account greeted him.  Daenerys must have left a Snapchat for him instead of calling in the middle of the night.  He smiled fondly as he opened the app on his phone.  Trying to remember his daughter’s instructions, he tapped on the message from Daenerys.

            A selfie of Daenerys and a slightly taller girl appeared on his screen.  The other girl was blushing lightly, but she was also wearing a positively giddy smile.  Her eyes were on Daenerys, rather than the camera.  Daenerys was grinning at the camera in a very self-assured fashion, but Rhaegar could also see a trace of exhilaration in her violet eyes.  Courting Missandei might require more hard work than Daenerys had ever put into a relationship before, but Rhaegar suspected it would be good for her.

            The caption on the screen read, “She loved the poem!! Meet Missandei, my official gf =) <3”

            Carefully, Rhaegar pressed the buttons that Rhaenys had told him would save the image onto his phone.

            A moment later, a new text from Daenerys appeared on his screen.  “u know i can see when u screenshot my snaps,” she had written.

            “I think you owe me after I helped you woo Missandei,” he typed back.  “I also need a new caller ID photo for your contact.”

            Daenerys responded with a “:P” and “<3”, which Rhaegar was fairly sure meant she wasn’t too displeased.  He flicked through his contact list until he reached “Ur Favorite Sister (Dany).”  With a few swipes of the screen, he had changed her contact image from the old photo on the beach to the new one she had just sent him.

            And then, because while he loved his sister, he also loved being able to sleep through the night, he changed her personal ringtone from his usual “Bear and the Maiden Fair” to silence.  If it was _really_ important, he told himself, she could always call the landline.  And if she ever needed a short-notice poetry editor again, well – she could always call back in the morning.  Or ask Viserys.

**Author's Note:**

> Come hang out with me [on Tumblr](azurish.tumblr.com) if you want to yell more about Game of Thrones femslash! =)


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